AB 338

This bill creates several requirements for hospitals to provide cost information

for certain items and services provided by the hospital. Under the bill, each hospital

must make publicly available a digital file in a machine-readable format that

contains a list of standard charges for certain items and services provided by the

hospital and a consumer-friendly list of standard charges for certain shoppable

services. “Standard charge” is defined to mean the regular rate established by the

hospital for an item or service provided to a specific group of paying patients and

includes certain price information, including the gross charge, the payor-specific

negotiated charge, and the discounted cash price. “Shoppable service” is defined to

mean a service that may be scheduled by a health care consumer in advance. If the

Department of Health Services determines that a hospital is not in compliance with

any of the price transparency requirements specified in the bill, the bill requires DHS

to take certain actions, including providing a written notice to the hospital,

requesting a corrective action plan from the hospital, or imposing a penalty. The bill

establishes escalating penalties for violations of the hospital price transparency

requirements specified in the bill based on the hospital's bed count, from $600 for

each day in which a hospital with 30 beds or fewer violates the hospital price

transparency requirements under the bill up to $10,000 for each day in which a

hospital with greater than 550 beds violates the hospital price transparency

requirements under the bill. The bill also requires DHS to maintain a publicly

available list of hospitals that have been found to have violated any of the price

transparency requirements specified in the bill.

Under the bill, the list of standard charges must be available at all times to the

public in a machine-readable format, must be displayed in a prominent location on

the home page of the hospital's website, and must include certain information,

including a description of each hospital item or service provided and any code used

by the hospital for purposes of accounting or billing. Further, the list of standard

charges must meet certain criteria, including that it must be available free of charge

and without having to establish a user account or password, that the list is available

without having to submit personal identifying information, that the list is digitally

searchable, and that the list is accessible to a commercial operator of an Internet

search engine as necessary for the search engine to index the list and display the list

as a result in response to a search query of a user of the search engine. The list of

standard charges must be updated at least once each year.

Further, under the bill, the consumer-friendly list of standard charges for

shoppable services must be publicly available and must contain standard charge

information for each of at least 300 shoppable services provided by the hospital. The

bill allows a hospital to select the shoppable services to be included in the list, except

that the list must include either the 70 services specified as shoppable services by

the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) or, if the hospital does